At a reception in the Old Admiralty Building, Whitehall, in the summer of 2005, deputy prime minister John Prescott, in the course of a brilliantly witty speech, said that he intended that night to awake the jet-lagged prime minister Tony Blair, just returned from official duties in India, and say, “Sire, we have won a great victory - but we have lost Lord Nelson”.

This would have been a fitting finale to the 200th anniversary reconstruction of the journey from Falmouth to London by post chaise of Lieutenant John Lapenotiere, captain of the schooner Pickle, carrying Admiral Collingwood’s dispatch and the electrifying news of the battle of Trafalgar. That night, Lord Barham, First Sea Lord, hastened to 10 Downing Street to apprise William Pitt of a victory which had important strategic implications. While the Napoleonic wars had ten years more to run and the imminent battle of Austerlitz would destroy Pitt’s arduously compiled third coalition of European powers and hasten his death, Britain would henceforth be immune to invasion.

The enthusiasts of the 1805 Club had recreated Lapenotiere’s ride using a magnificent black and yellow post-chaise, thereby generating a huge patriotic response throughout the market towns, villages and coaching inns along a route now established as the Trafalgar Way. But this was not the end of the story.

King George III was at Windsor. "Farmer George" as he was often known because of his interest in agriculture, was a popular monarch and still held at the dawn of the 19th century very considerable political power. Today recognised as a sufferer of the rare disorder porphyria, he had had episodes of insanity in 1765, 1788 and 1801 and would die insane in 1811, his reign surpassed in length only by that of Queen Victoria.

It was urgently necessary to send the news to Windsor. It seems likely that Barham, rather than have Collingwood’s lengthy dispatch copied in its entirety, wrote a briefer account and sent a representative to Windsor together with a no doubt thoroughly exhausted Lapenotiere as the only eyewitness available in London. The journey probably took about three hours.

They interrupted the royal breakfast on the morning of November 6, 1805. Accounts show that King George with other members of the royal family were much moved at the news of the death of Lord Nelson. Having regained his composure, the King named the battle "Trafalgar".

It was clearly the custom, and of course polite, to reward the bearer of such important news. It was characteristic of King George’s warm nature that he should immediately cast about his breakfast table for something suitable, his eye falling upon a silver muffineer, or spice sifter, which he presented to Laponetiere.

Engraved with the date, June 22 1773, and with the royal cipher GR, this object will be on display from the Liskeard Museum (close to where Lapenotiere retired) at a reception in Windsor Castle in the presence of HRH the Duke of Edinburgh to celebrate this event on the evening of Friday November 9th. The post chaise will arrive in the quadrangle of the castle and an illuminated copy of the new Trafalgar dispatch celebrating the brotherhood of the sea will be presented to HRH in the Queen’s Guard chamber.